March 2 – Today’s Food History

Posted on March 2, 2012

Happy birthday to Theodor Seuss Geisel, Dr. Seuss. What would life be like without Greens Eggs and Ham?

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Food Holiday

National Banana Cream Pie Day

Today’s Food History

on this day in…

1799 The first U.S. weights and measures law was passed by Congress. Actually it did not set standards, but rather required the surveyor of each port to test and correct the instruments and weights used to calculate duties on imports. Basically each surveyor was on his own in setting the standards to be tested.

1887 Harry E. Soref was born. Inventor of the laminated steel padlock, founder of the Master Lock Company in 1921. The company became well known in 1928 when it shipped 147,600 padlocks to federal prohibition agents in New York for locking up speakeasies they raided.

1962The Twilight Zone episode ‘To Serve Man’ premiered. It is about aliens who arrive here ‘to serve man,’ but not quite in the way we assumed. Their manual on how ‘to serve man’ turns out to be a cookbook.

1989 A phone call to the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, Chile begins a chain of events that results in an 11 day embargo of Chilian fruit. The anonymous phone call, and another one on March 9, warns that Red Flame grapes on the way to the U.S. have been injected with cyanide. Over 2 million crates of Chilean fruit is impounded and 20.000 Chilean food workers lose their jobs. Consumers in the U.S. and several other countries stop eating grapes of any kind for a month. No real evidence of contamination was found.

I’m a big Dr. Seuss fan! I used to own a couple of coffee houses in Orange County and we had green eggs and ham on the menu. We didn’t have a full kitchen but we used to add pesto and ham to scramble eggs and then cook them on our milk steamers. It took seconds and they turned out great. Customers loved them. The world is a better place because of Dr. Seuss!

Was that Twilight Zone episode where the idea for “Cooking For Forty Humans” (from one of the Halloween specials on “The Simpsons”) came from? When I read this post, that was the first thing to come to mind.